IU Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing announces record year of research funding
Indiana University Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing received a school record $18.5 million in grants and awards for research and other sponsored programs during fiscal year 2012. The amount represents a nearly 40 percent jump over the school's previous high and a 70 percent increase over fiscal year 2011.
"This is wonderful news to share at the start of a new school year," Informatics Dean Bobby Schnabel said. "Research funding has many benefits: It gives our faculty the resources needed to conduct their research; it supports graduate students; it helps attract high-caliber faculty and students; and it helps our reputation."
The school also recorded the second-highest total ever for research expenditures at $13.4 million, falling short of last year's record $14.8 million and surpassing the $12 million spent on research during fiscal year 2010.
"These levels are extremely competitive with our highly ranked peers," Schnabel said. "We clearly have reached a point where our performance, as measured by the impact of our research and our research funding levels, is competitive with institutions recognized with placement at the top of public reputational rankings."
Significant to the successful year was the breadth of funding for research groups in both computer science and informatics. The school has historically seen funding strength in high-performance computing and cyber-infrastructure, which continued again in fiscal year 2012, but that was accompanied this year by large-scale funding successes in areas including bioinformatics, complex networks and systems, data science, health informatics, human computer interaction, networks, programming languages and security.
Ten faculty members -- Johan Bollen, Alessandro Flammini, Geoffrey Fox, Matthew Hahn, Andrew Lumsdaine, Filippo Menczer, Beth Plale, Thomas Sterling, Craig Alan Stewart and D. Martin Swany -- each accumulated more than $1 million in awards during the year, with Fox topping the list, receiving over $5 million from eight separate awards. Another nine researchers earned awards totaling in the $500,000 to $1 million range over the year: Kelly Caine, Kay Connelly, Alessandro Flammini, Judy Qiu, Matthias Scheutz, Marty Siegel, Erik Stolterman, Alessandro Vespignani and XiaoFeng Wang.
The awards and expenditures represent funding provided to Informatics and Computing faculty either through the school or through the IU Office of the Vice President for Information Technology in conjunction with IU's Pervasive Technology Institute.
The record funding announcement for the nation's first School of Informatics and Computing comes one week after IU President Michael A. McRobbie announced $533 million in grants and awards for research and other sponsored programs in fiscal year 2012, the second-highest annual total ever at IU.
Originally published Aug. 23, 2012.
